Can students really study effectively while listening to music?
/Updated Aug 2022
Most students we work with tell us they listen to music while studying. In contrast, many parents/caregivers we talk to feel concerned about this, wondering: “can they really concentrate with that going on in their ears?”
Like many things - it’s not a simple “it’s fine”, versus “it’s terrible” situation.
First, let’s consider the potential advantages for some students in listening to music while studying. These are as follows:
Many students say listening to music helps them study for longer. This makes sense: homework can be boring, hard to persist with and tedious at times. If something can make it slightly less boring, students are more likely to keep doing it for longer.
Listening to predictable music has been found in several studies to be LESS distracting than listening to random or unpredictable noise - ie like that which might happen in many offices/households noise. So if the level of noise in the house is both high and unpredictable, then having music to block that out can help students concentrate.
Music puts students in a good mood. Some studies have found it makes people feel less stressed, more confident and happier. This may be helpful for studying because the better mood we are in, the longer we persist on hard tasks and the better we do at difficult tasks: good news for students.
So with all of those potential advantages, what’s the problem with music? The other side of the record (a pun for those over 35) is that research consistently shows that compared to silence, people are less skilled at doing complex tasks while listening to music.
For example, some studies show that if you give people a problem solving task and then compare people who do it in silence compared to people doing in while listening to music, those working in silence do the task more accurately and more quickly compared to those listening to music.
In other words, it seems that music interferes with our attention and cognitive skills. This is especially true for music with lyrics and music that is “unpredictable” in some way (ie potentially music which is less well known by the listener).
It’s important to note that these studies just look at the effects on music on the average person - and it may well be different for different people. For example, some studies have found that introverts are more likely to be more negatively impacted by listening to music than extroverts.
It may also be that children and teens with emotional health concerns or who are neurodiverse respond either more positively to listening to music while studying (ie helps regulate emotions and increases coping) OR less positively (they have more difficulties with splitting their attention or feeling distracted).
Given the advantages and disadvantages, here are the recommendations we give students about this issue:
Listen to music when you feel like you really “have to” – when you are bored, in a bad mood, feel a need to manage your emotions, having difficulties with motivation and feel like music would help
Listen to music if your house is really noisy (or unpredictably noisy) and you can’t shut it out any other way.
BUT recognise that you are quite likely to be distracted or less accurate when listening to music so try to:
Turn the music off when you are doing something quite hard (e.g revising for a test or trying to understand difficult concepts)
Listen to music without lyrics if you can (e.g classical, electronica), music that has a predictable beat/tune or music that is very familiar to you.
Turn the music down a couple of notches compared to the volume you listen to it normally.
Almost all students listen to music at some point while studying but it is worth having a discussion with them about what works and what doesn’t, what their plan will be to manage it and to ask them how they will monitor how it helps or hinders them.
